Speed Bump
Story on June 26, 2013, South Florida, Earth One (Infopunk Earth) by Prince Charon The general attitude of local and regional police personnel in the USA(1) towards superheroes, even those of us affiliated with licensed NGOs, tends to fall into four main categories: 1. 'We don't need you freaks.' 2. 'We don't want you freaks, but we need you to deal with those other freaks.' 3. 'We need all the help we can get, even if the help is a little (or a lot) freaky.' 4. 'I don't like the way people call you guys freaks, but you need more training.' The second and third sometimes overlap with an attitude toward a few individual supers of 'You may be a freak, but you're our freak.' The situation can perhaps be likened to that experienced by any newly-arriving ethnic group, but is clearly not a perfect match - we come from all ethnicities, creeds, social strata, and walks of life, after all (though this doesn't stop some of the people who got their powers from reading too many X-Men comics from pulling the 'mutant race' card all the damn time). At least the first and second attitudes have mostly disappeared since I woke up after the failed attack on Yellowstone, but the cost is painful; a lot of Lanterns and other psykers died, or have yet to wake up. Some of the rings seem to have burnt out, but a lot of others went looking for replacements, which means we have a surge of rookies, on top of most of the 'experienced' surviving Lanterns being still in training, ourselves. At least those of us who joined the NGOs are getting training, and not running out to 'fight crime' with no idea what we're doing, and mostly making things harder for the cops (which the rest of us get flack for). A related issue is that most superheroes, even the ones who are cops already, are more than a little idealistic (though far from saintly), rightly viewing the Blue Wall of Silence as a betrayal of the badge, and of the public trust. (The fact that so many of us are so idealistic, even if we're cynical in other areas, is something that a number of us wonder about. There's been talk of 'genre fairies' shaping our lives, which worries me. Are powered criminals being chosen for their criminal tendencies, or are they being compelled...?) The point of all this reminiscing was to aid my multitasking skills and avoid thinking about my fear of heights (or rather, fear of deceleration trauma) as I hovered thirty feet above a retention pond, held up by sheer willpower... and a glowing green ring that had once been a common plastic toy that I bought on a whim some years ago. A few months ago, I would have made a fairly shocking sight: a flying man shrouded in an aura of translucent green flames, wearing mostly green and black US Army surplus riot armour, complete with three chevrons on each upper sleeve, a modified gas mask, a helmet, a utility belt, and an eccentric choice of sidearm (a S&W Governor, the only six-shot revolver I could find that would load and fire .410 bore shotgun shells - it could also handle .45 Long Colt, and .45 ACP with a moon clip, but I carried neither). Now, I still looked pretty odd for a Lantern (more of us tended to go more for spandex than body armour, or holograms over street clothes, despite many having colours or materials that our rings don't want to work on - a fact well-known to the criminal element, even if most of them only remember yellow), but thanks to so many of us flying around on the news, I wasn't completely bizarre. The Bluetooth rang while I was starting to contemplate the view. "Hello?" "Sorry to interrupt your break, Decurion," said Kelli-with-an-i, our duty dispatcher (I almost corrected her on the rank, the promotion too new, and the reason too raw), "but the cops need a little help: that speedster from yesterday is back, he robbed a RaceTrac this time. They're in pursuit, but he keeps going places cars and motorbikes can't. I'm sending the map data to your HUD, you're the closest flyer to the action." Well then, my first supervillain (no, Dr. Implausible does not count - as a supervillain or a doctor - and the 'Rouge Angles of Satin' (yes, spelled like that) would not have been that much of a threat to the out-of-shape nerd I was before I got my powers). No partner either, because the politicians wanted maximum exposure to 'reassure the public,' and there just weren't enough of use to go around (also, possibly, they wanted to exercise their 'soft power' over us, to reassure themselves that they still could). "Understood," I replied, looking at the map. "Going to jet mode." 'Jet mode' was what you might call a macro that I'd programmed into my ring: as I shifted to horizontal flight with my arms to my sides, the ring projected a construct around me in the form of a 1/6th scale (a bit over 3 metres long) F-15 Eagle. In much dimmer light than this, you'd be able to see large, distorted cones attached to the air intakes, which swept moisture from the humid Florida air. Behind the intakes, the ring split hydrogen from oxygen, and behind my feet, electrical sparks and a construct catalyst energetically converted the hydrogen and oxygen back into water, while the other air brought in cooled the exhaust. Construct prisms on my helmet allowed me to see ahead with half my vision, and below with the other half. This complex action allowed me to fly higher and faster than I could under my own willpower, oddly enough, though I'm not sure whether it's due to my phobia, or my will not being strong enough. I suppose it could be both. I'm far from the only one who did this: many lanterns can't fly without a construct, whether due to mental blocks or insufficient willpower, and more cannot fly under their own power at all (though few of the latter join crime-fighting NGOs as active agents, since they tend to have weak shields and other effects, as well). It didn't take more than a couple of minutes to reach the target area, and I saw a streak of yellow dart out between two buildings. "Ring, scan and record." "Scanning," the ring replied, and information poured into my mind. Much to my surprise, he was a living person using his power to reinforce his body to move at greater speeds - in this case about 42 miles per hour, which seemed to be close to his top speed. It also appeared likely that he would be able to heal and recover faster, and based on yesterday's police report, hitting him with a taser just made him faster. I'd been expecting a spirit with psychokinesis, or a visible astral projection like Bluestreak in Orlando, because physical speedsters are rare. For a moment I was distracted consider the implications, but shook myself out of it. Capture bad guy now, I thought, figure out how to replicate what he does later. Catching speedsters is generally pretty tricky, because they almost always react faster than non-speedsters - otherwise they'd keep tripping over or running into things. So, while seeing him was useful, I needed to know where he was going to be, and how he would to react. I've got two ways to 'trick' my semi-randomly activating Second Sight into acting like directed precognition. The slow way, with Tarot cards, is useless in situations like that, but the fast way, using just the ring, leaves me feeling like I've run a marathon, which is not good in flight. I reinforced the hover effect that supplements my construct's wings at low speed, and concentrated... I almost fell out of the sky anyway, catching myself a few feet above a street lamp, but I got what I needed. Moving in closer, before he could reach the stand of woods he seems to be heading for, a put up an arching wall in front of him. Naturally, he immediately ran straight up the wall, straight into a forming bubble. We'd speculated about how to capture speedsters before, and the idea of them running around the inside of a force-bubble to escape via centrifugal force had come up, so I made the bubble freely rotating to prevent that, and added a second bubble just outside of it, to protect anyone from touching the first bubble before he calmed down. Instead of trying that, though, he seemed to fall forward, catching himself on his hands, and appeared to make a few dozen attempts to punch his way out. To minimize distraction while trying to maintain the bubble against this assault, I came in for a landing next to it, folding and dismissing the mini F-15 construct with a five-tone harmonic buzz-crunch that would be familiar to most people who were kids in America in the 1980s. I pinged the cops with our GPS coordinates while I caught my breath, and it wasn't long after that that the guy calmed down enough that I got a good look at him. I was not impressed: Starting at the top, he wore a yellow ski mask which had been unevenly cut away around the nose, mouth, and chin, and there were red designs embroidered over his ears that might be either wings or lightning bolts, or could be something totally other. Below that, he wore a yellow 'Members Only' jacket with the tag torn off, and a red lightning bolt on a white roundel on the pocket. He also had on a half-open yellow messenger backpack, a pair of yellow rubber dishwashing gloves, yellow trousers with a red canvas belt, and yellow converse all stars. "This is what is known as a citizen's arrest, in case you were wondering," I told him, as I heard the sirens rapidly approaching. He gave a fast, high-pitched reply that I was unable to parse. Luckily, while my ring does not permanently record everything without orders, it does hold things in a buffer for a few minutes. "Ring, play back what he just said at, I guess, one-third speed." "How are you doing this!? You're a Green Lantern I'm wearing yellow this shouldn't work!" "Real life," I replied, "is not a comic book. Ring, play that back for him at three times speed." Not like I was going to tell him what my actual weakness was. That's about when the cops arrived, lead by Sergeant Jameson, one of the more OK cops I've worked with. "Good catch," said Jameson, getting out of his car. "Thank you," I replied. "He seems to be unable to slow down, or perhaps just unwilling, so his lawyer may insist on concessions relating to that." "Great," he sighed, "just what we need." Glancing at the cops getting out of the other car, he glared at the younger one and shouted "Put that damn taser away, didn't you read the report!?" I hadn't even noticed, being a bit more focused on maintaining the two force bubbles. After a few seconds, he said "OK, you can do that thing with the bubble." 'That thing' was to shrink and deform the inner bubble such that it almost took on the shape of the contents, then open holes in it, and finally take on the form of handcuffs with a gradually-shrinking chain, to pull his hand behind his back. I then allowed the outer bubble to dissipate. Jameson then put actual cuffs on the thief, and pulled his mask off. "Hang on, I know this guy," said the sergeant. "Danny Whithammer. I busted him a few times for dine-and-dash, purse snatching, convenience store robbery... always 'steal something and run,' ain't that right, Danny?" That... was a potentially interesting data point. Category:Setting Concepts Category:Fanwork